A GPS telling me I’m still 47 minutes away after I’ve been driving for what feels like a fucking lifetime can make me start doing stupid shit to shave five minutes off the drive. I once spent half a road trip changing lanes because I was convinced the faster one had personally betrayed me, then took a shortcut that added twenty minutes. Every red light started feeling insulting. I got so obsessed with shaving time off the drive that I barely noticed where the hell I was. That stupid urgency is all over Flora Fiora’s Kick The Tyres. She knows where she wants to end up and cannot stop fucking with the journey because it is taking longer than she wants. The song understands how easily ambition can turn progress into something that still feels like standing still.
Mike Batt and Luke Batt produced Kick The Tyres, and the arrangement keeps feeding the same impatience Flora is writing about. She spends the song braking and restarting while everything underneath her keeps nudging forward. Even when the vocals widen out later, it feels less like some grand breakthrough and more like her brain finally getting sick of sitting in fucking traffic. The music keeps moving before Flora has fully decided whether she is ready to.
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Flora starts by admitting she has become part of the problem with “I hit the brakes in automatic / It took away some of the risk / Somehow I found a way to stall it / I’ll, Apologise before it’s fixed.” That is career anxiety protecting you from failure so aggressively that it starts interfering with movement. Then she checks the rearview and catches herself caring about people who are not even there. “Whats the point in having break lights / If I can see no one is there” gets right at the ridiculousness of comparison. Half the time you are performing progress for an imaginary audience while nobody is actually chasing your ass.
All that restraint blows apart when Flora gets to “Kick the tyres / Smash the windows in / Im sick and tired / Of putting up with it.” Career frustration has officially stopped journaling and picked up a tire iron. I love the violence of it because she is pissed at the vehicle carrying her toward the thing she wants. Then “If I keep my head down / Will the airbag stop the crash out” exposes the fear underneath all that rage. She wants speed and knows speed can hurt. She still chooses “Ill get back in,” because ambition can be one hell of a toxic situationship. Shit, I understand that relationship.
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A red light finally makes Flora look around long enough to realize how much she has been missing. “Too busy looking for the short cut / I missed the view along the road” is the line that changes the song for me. She has spent so much time trying to arrive that the life happening around the career became scenery. Then “Now I know where im going / I feel my engines kicking in” gives her some direction. The funniest part is that she eventually leaves the damn car anyway. “So I leave the car where it is / Im running” gets her moving without waiting for the machine to cooperate.
Flora Fiora is 19 and comes from Chedworth, Gloucestershire. BBC Introducing backed her early, and Right Tracks later signed her. Kick The Tyres now opens her debut EP In No Particular Order, which makes all this impatience pretty fucking revealing. Her career is moving. Flora simply wants it moving faster, and the song catches that maddening distance between measurable progress and the version of success already screaming at you from somewhere ahead.
That road trip eventually got me where I was going, twenty minutes later and considerably more pissed off than necessary. The embarrassing part was realizing the road had been fine. I was the one fighting every mile because arriving had become more important than actually going anywhere. Flora reaches that same realization on Kick The Tyres and finally quits arguing with the vehicle. She leaves the car where it is and runs. Sometimes getting where you want to go starts when you stop treating every fucking minute on the way there like wasted time.
